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Drawing Open-Source Triangles On The ATI RV770

12-31-2008, 02:00 AM

Phoronix: Drawing Open-Source Triangles On The ATI RV770

On Monday AMD released the open-source R600/700 3D code to begin fostering the development of an open-source 3D driver for their newer ATI hardware while the related programming documentation still on the way. This code that's finally out in the public domain brings basic EXA acceleration and X-Video support, but on the 3D side there isn't any usable OpenGL support. It is expected that there will be a modest level of open-source 3D support for the ATI R600 and R700 series in the first half of 2008 for end-users, but for now there is just the DRM code and an r600_demo program. In this article we are taking a brief look at this r600_demo debugging utility on the RV770 hardware.

For a bit of history, I think this is the first triangle ever drawn on 6xx/7xx with "our own code", back in August :

Note the top of the triangle is missing; it took a few months to go from this point (where the code only worked on Alex's system and only with one specific card) to the point where it worked on most of our systems and all of the cards we had, then another month or so to get through final IP review and out the door.

Comment

omg, triangles - and that too open source, yummy . holy jesus christ. nope, nothing to take away, its just that i find it funny in the big picture (and to write an article about). its sure awesome to see a baby walking first time though (especially after watching it crawl for years, that too in the world of iron man who learns to run before walking ). keep up the good work .

and i am pleasantly surprised at the overwhelming response (close to 100 replies within a day!) at the article regarding amd/ati releasing r600/700 doc/code. just shows the amount of expectation (and frustration ) ati users have.

would be very interesting now to see how some clean simple (native) and by-and-large full-featured code written from scratch works against a complex bloated (essentially ported?) ultra-featured (including a awesome watermark) fglrx. personally, i am sure david will beat goliath .